THE NUMBERS / THE EMPTY SEAT

THE NUMBERS (Part 1)

Thirty-six years of resolutions left undone. Four hundred thirty months of starting over, never once following through. Nineteen hundred weeks that never made it past day two. Thirteen thousand days I couldn't escape. Nineteen million minutes wanting to rip my own spine out, bleed the DNA dry so nothing of this ever replicates again. 

God, fuck you — I could never pass down what you cursed me with, out of the womb, a Sunday morning, 8:32. 

Here I am running the numbers again. What I owe. Who I'll never live up to. Whose face I'll wear today, and one of these days the mask sticks and I stop existing and not one piece of the cosmos, not even earth, gets bothered by the news. 

Heaven doesn't care. It never has. Grew up strict Catholic, learned early that god just stands still while I beg, in tears, for relief from the curse he handed me at birth. 

No reply. Never has been. Never will be. God's just more fake news. 

I keep asking why wake. He doesn't answer anyone — let alone his own mistakes. 

And still, somehow, I'm dressed by nine. 

THE EMPTY SEAT  (Part 2)

Maybe one day I'll finally do it — take the long road down, find the one they exiled first for being different, sit across from him the way no one ever sat with me, and ask the question heaven never had the spine to answer. 

He'll laugh. Not cruel — just tired. Nobody answers here either, he'll say. I asked the same thing on my way down. Silence was the first punishment. It's been the only one since. 

So I won't stay in hell asking new gods old questions. I'll cross the Styx myself, boatman be damned, climb every rung of every heaven they promised us as children, break the gate with my own hands if the hinges won't give, 

and find — 

nothing. Not judgment. Not wrath. Not even absence dressed as mercy. Just a throne with the shape of someone who was never going to sit in it, a silence so total it swallows even echo, a big bang still expanding through a room that was empty before the first prayer ever left a human mouth. 

And I'll stand there — not angel, not demon, not son — just one more voice in the long line of everyone who ever climbed that high hoping the emptiness had a name. 

It didn't. It still doesn't. And maybe that's the answer: not silence as punishment, just silence because there was never anyone home to answer at all. 

I'll walk in like every ruined thing before me walked in — not asking to be saved, just asking to be seen by whatever built the architecture of this silence. 

The throne is bigger up close. Marble worn smooth not by hands but by centuries of nobody sitting down. I run my palm along the armrest the way you'd touch a grave you weren't sure was really empty. 

I call out every name I was ever taught to fear — not to summon them, just to see if fear still works when there's nothing left to be afraid of. 

Nothing answers. Not the devil behind me, done laughing now, arms crossed, watching a mortal do what he never had the courage to finish himself. Not the angels, if there ever were angels, their wings just architecture too, gold leaf over an absence that was there before the gold. 

I sit. Not because I've earned it. Because someone has to, because an empty throne is worse than a cruel god, because at least a tyrant would explain the terms, and this — this is just a shape where meaning was supposed to live and never moved in. 

From here I can see all of it — every knee that ever bent toward this ceiling, every prayer that hit the vault and just came back down as weather, every kid on his own bedroom floor at 3 a.m. asking why wake to a silence that was never listening, because listening requires someone and there was never anyone in the room. 

I don't feel like a god. I feel like the last man standing in a house the owner never built, holding a key to a door that was never locked — because there was nothing on the other side worth keeping in. 

So this is the secret they buried under scripture, under catechism, under every stained-glass window throwing colored light on empty pews: 

there is no answer coming. There never was one. The universe didn't withhold meaning from us — it simply never had any to give. 

And somehow — that's not the ending I expected. Because if no one's coming, no one's punishing me either. No one's keeping score. No one carved unworthy into my name before I was born. 

I made that part up. So did you. So did every voice that ever told us we were the mistake in a universe too empty to make mistakes at all. 

I'm still sitting here. The seat's still empty around me, but it doesn't feel like a throne anymore. 

It just feels like a place to finally put the weight down. 

I’ve been building out Then I Woke Up, a new poetry chapbook that sits in the same raw, confessional register as the rest of my work — and these two poems ended up as a pair, even though they didn’t start that way.

“The Numbers” started as an attempt to count everything: the years, the months, the days, the minutes spent stuck in the same loop of starting over and never following through. It’s the most literal poem in the collection — no metaphor doing the heavy lifting, just arithmetic and a refrain that keeps circling back: why wake.

“The Empty Seat” picks up where the numbers stop making sense and goes looking for an answer somewhere bigger — hell, the Styx, heaven’s gate, an empty throne. It’s the mythic counterpart to the first poem’s confession: what happens when you finally go looking for whoever’s supposed to be keeping score, and find no one home.

Both poems will appear in Then I Woke Up post and chapbook, out later this year under Matthew P. Haubert, Fracture & Form.